Why Do Diets Fail?

People burn fat on a very general calories in/calories out model. Your body needs a specific amount of calories per day to operate (somewhere between 1800 and 3500 depending on weight and gender), and excess calories are stored as fat, while too few calories burns fat for fuel.

That is the basics of all diets. So in some sense, diets never truly “stop working” if you maintain the calories in, calories out model. However, there are plenty of reasons you may find that you’re not losing weight anymore. These include:

Less Movement From Less Energy – The Calories In, Calories Out model is based on the amount of energy you use up on a regular basis. If your diet isn’t healthy enough, you may be losing energy, moving less, and thus burning more calories than you did before.

Slowed Metabolism – Starvation diets can cause you to lose weight fast. But they also slow metabolism, so you start to burn less fat and gain weight quicker if you eat more calories. They also cause a significant loss of energy.

Water Weight – When you first start working out, you burn a lot of water weight. Indeed, if you haven’t worked out for a while, most of the first pounds you’ll lose will be water weight, and you should lose them very quickly.

Extra Calories – Many people diet without an accurate calorie count, and in many cases they start to cheat on their diets without realizing it. For example, if you find yourself hungry and snack on chips, you may be adding 400 or more calories to your diet without even realizing it. That’s one of the reasons diets need to be monitored and sustainable, so that you don’t cheat and know how many calories you’re taking in.

Not Plateauing – Finally, just because it seems like you’ve reached a plateau doesn’t mean you actually have. The body’s weight fluctuates often, even when you’re successfully losing weight. You may be gaining muscle, you may have gained a little bit of water weight because it was a particularly hot day. You may not have been to the bathroom recently – there are plenty of reasons your weight is the same even if the diet is “working.” You may want to wait a longer period of time before considering the diet a failure.

There is also the question of what diet you’re using. Dieting shouldn’t be some massive change that cuts out important foods, like carbohydrates or fat. It should be balanced, and simply lower calories than you ate previously and combined with medical weight loss methods.